Rice concerns thousands, if not
millions, of people in addition to rice farmers. On the pre-production side
there are the producers and manufacturers of inputs (seeds, fertilizers,
pesticides) and machinery and the traders who sell them.
On the postproduction side, there
are processors, traders, wholesalers, retailers and consumers.
Matty Demont is an agricultural
economist based at the AfricaRice Sahel Station. “The Senegalese eat mostly
imported rice instead of the locally produced rice — why?” he asks. “The answer
must be related to rice value chains in Senegal, and it will give us clues how
to orient rice strategy to the end-user — making the chains buyer-driven”.
The vast majority of Senegalese
people in Senegal eat imported rice. This preference is influenced, at least in
major part, by the fact that locally produced rice (especially in the
Senegal River valley [SRV] in the north) has historically been of mediocre
quality, comprising mixed varieties, heterogeneous grain quality and with
unacceptably high levels of impurities.
But what if it was tailored to
market preferences in terms of quality and presentation, would the people pay for
it?
By using an experimental auction system,
and locally produced branded rice (Rival — a trademarked brand of domestic rice,
marketed by the NGO Plateforme d’appui aux initiatives du nord, PINORD), Demont
and his team found that women consumers were willing to pay a premium for Rival
more than double what they would and do pay for imported rice on the market
(38% cf. 16%).
That said, some 20% of the
participants preferred the conventional SRV rice. “The policy implication here
is that we should never seek to push all SRV rice down the route of
quality”, says Demont. “There is a market segment of consumers who are not
willing to pay for quality. Value chain development should ensure that
conventional SRV rice remains available for those consumers if improving its
quality will result in significantly higher prices”.
The key lessons from the value-chain work conducted in
Senegal are that the availability of quality local (SRV) rice needs to be
promoted among the population, production of quality rice requires investment,
and policy needs to be sequenced — starting with increasing the quality of
locally produced rice to the level of imported rice, which adds value to the
product; scaling up rice production; and running promotional programs to market
the surplus and replace imported rice in urban end-markets.
An article “Policy Sequencing and the Development ofRice Value Chains in Senegal” by Matty Demont and Amy C. Rizzotto, published in June 2012 in “Development Policy Review,” focuses on this issue.
